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No, I'm not offering you free wire. Just telling you a good source for free wire.

With the whole world going HDMI these days, there are plenty of obsolete SCART cables around. You probably have some in your attic or garage, mouldering away in a box.

Strip them down. That's right - remove the connectors and the outer rubber casing, and bingo - you have a great selection of wire. Lots of different colour wires, usually in the 22-28 AWG range, and usually pretty high quality as well. And on top of that there's normally a good few lengths of shielded cable too! Bargain!

I recently needed to connect an ESP8266 board up to an audio control and processing board I was working on. And as you can guess the noise was horrendous. Kind of like when you leave your mobile phone near a radio and someone calls you. Pop, pop, crackle, pop pop...

So, some filtering was in order. In the end I came up with this circuit:

The values can probably be refined somewhat, but I just used components I had lying around.

This is a little sketch that I find useful for testing the serial communication on an Arduino-like board. It not only sends data of its own accord (millis() every second), but also echoes back what it receives. That way it will test both transmission and reception, so if one is failing you can easily see.

The SWA1 Smart WiFi sockets are great cheap WiFi controlled sockets that you can get on Amazon (see them on my kit page). Not only are they very convenient, but they are eminently hackable. Hackable to the extreme.

Arrays and pointers are always a problem for newcommers to C and C++ programmers. Especially if they have come from higher level, more "dumbed down" languages like Java or Basic.

You may think that an array is an array, right? And an array in one language works the same as an array in another language, cus they're, like, arrays, aren't they? Well, you couldn't be more wrong. Certainly when it comes to arrays in C and C++, anyway.

I guess you're probably used to working with arrays like this (pseudocode):

This is the first part of a new series entitled "1x10³²⁴ things to do with a chipKIT™ Lenny and a QuickIO". In it, I'm going to be exploring some of the cool things you could do in just a matter of seconds using the two boards combined.

Vacuum Fluorescent Displays are probably one of the coolest displays of all time. Certainly one of the most popular of recent history. Developed in 1959 by Philips they have endured right through to modern times. You can even still find them in current consumer electronics.

It's not always obvious how to configure the WiFi on the Arduino Yùn properly, since most of the good settings are hidden away in the "advanced" interface. So I'll do what I can to expose them to you.

First off, when messing with the WiFi, you really want to be connected to the Yùn using an Ethernet cable (you most probably had one provided with your WiFi router when you got it - it's buried at the bottom of a drawer somewhere).

These handy pushbuttons are great for rapidly connecting to your pet Arduino. With 50cm (approx 20 inches) of wire and a 2-pin 2.54mm (0.1") plug on the end they are simple to use. And the action on them is nice and definite. A good click without being hard to press.